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Friday, March 18, 2016

For all the live concerts I’ve gone to in my life, and there are
more than a few, I haven’t seen a lot of the big name classic rock
bands. I spent a lot of years in smaller venues seeing smaller acts
and actively skipped some big names. I have some regrets about this,
but it’s where my head was at the time.

Until Wednesday, March 16 I had never seen The Who. If I was going to
wait, I caught a good one. This is their 50 Years of the Who Greatest
Hits Tour, though I think the anniversary was last year. This show
was rescheduled from a cancelled date last fall.

My confession here is that I was really never that big of a fan of
The Who. Now, before Who Heads jump all over me, let me explain. I
never disliked them. I just never got really into them like
I’m known to do with bands and artists. I’m not sure why. But
they’ve been omnipresent for as long as I’ve listened to music,
so it’s not like I’ve been unaware of their work. In the
intervening years I’ve picked up most of their albums and become
very familiar with them.

I was too young to have caught the earliest British Invasion era of
The Who. I probably saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was a
kid. It was on pretty religiously when I was growing up and I have
vague memories of seeing bands, but none that I specifically
remember.

For some reason when I was a tween I bought a copy of a magazine
about the movie version of the Who album Tommy. I had never heard the
album at that time, and wouldn’t see the actual movie for another
fifteen years or more. But for some reason, probably because of the
amazingly weird visuals of that film, I was kind of obsessed with it
for awhile.

Not my actual copy, but this is it.

I’m pretty sure it was because of Elton John. I was getting into
Elton at the time, mainly because of the rock mag pictures I had seen
of his outrageous costumes. I liked the singles I had heard by the
that point as well and owned 45s of Rocket Man and Bennie and the
Jets.

In the movie Elton played the part of the Pinball Wizard. I was hearing his
version of the song on the radio. I was much more aware
of Elton than The Who at this point, so much so that I don’t think
I even realized it was a cover of someone else’s song. Dumb kid. I
went out to buy the single, grabbed a copy of Pinball Wizard, brought
it home and put it on my record player...

And it wasn’t Elton singing. It was some other version. When I
looked I saw it was by The Who and I had picked up the wrong version
by mistake. Okay, I can now say that I realize it was the right
version, but at the time my disappointment may have played a part in
my never getting more into them.

Not many years later I picked up a copy of Meaty, Beaty, Big, and
Bouncy, which I now know was a Greatest Hits compilation of The Who’s
early singles. I liked it a lot, but had trouble reconciling these
songs with the radio hits I was hearing in the mid to late 70s. I
think coming at the band from all of these different angles prevented
them from gelling in my mind as a cohesive concept.

In 1979 there was a terrible tragedy at a Who concert in Cincinnati
where eleven fans were killed and eight others hurt. It would be an
overstatement to say I was almost at the show, but there was a
short-lived possibility I could have been. My friend Howard and I had
gone to number of concerts around that time, at least one of which
was a spur of the moment, day of the show decision. I remember we
discussed making a road trip to Cincinnati for the show. It was
probably a less than fifteen minute fantasy because it was too far
away at the time and it was winter and our parents would have lost their
minds, and I only remember the conversation because of what
happened, and my reaction when I saw it on the news the following day.

So, finally, thirty-seven years later, I finally saw The Who... half of the original band anyway. It was an amazing show. Roger
Daltry’s voice is still really strong and very powerful. Pete
Townsend was just consummate on guitar. I know, intellectually, how
good he is, but to hear it live while watching him was something of a
revelation.

The performance was strong and I enjoyed the songs and music a lot.
But some of that was my awareness of the history represented on that
stage. These two men are two of the architects of modern Rock and
Roll. They helped invent the lexicon of the live rock show. When
Townsend windmilled his arm I saw the entire history of The Who in
that movement. The same thing when Daltry swung the microphone around
by its cord. I’ve seen this a million times. It’s in the DNA of
Rock and of Rock fans. These guys played at the Monterey Pop Festival
in 1967. They stood on the stage at Woodstock. They have known all of
the legends of Rock as friends and peers. Fifty years of being
The Who, spanning most of the history of the art form and having
stood on its spires. Fifty years of embodying a Pop Culture
mythology. Enormous legends living in the fragile shells of human
beings.

I want to take a moment to talk about the opening act, because I was
really impressed. For the original date Joan Jett was listed as the
the opener, which made me pretty excited. But, since the show had to
be rescheduled, Jett wasn’t able to do the make-up dates. I was
disappointed until I saw who was taking her place.

Tal Wilkenfeld is a 20-something bass guitar prodigy. I first saw her
as Jeff Beck’s bass player on a televised concert. She kind of blew
me away. I have a fondness for the bass anyway, and here was this
obviously very young woman with a mass of curly red hair, playing the
hell out of a bass guitar that was nearly bigger than she was,
holding her own with one of the acknowledged guitar gods. She has
racked up a pretty impressive resume. In addition to Beck she has
played with Jackson Browne, Hrebie Hancock, and a bunch of other name
artists.

Her first CD, Transformation, is an instrumental jazz album
where her skills are evident. I don’t listen to a whole lot of jazz or
instrumentals, but I kept coming back to this. At the concert I was
surprised to hear her sing. She has a very strong voice, and while it
seems she is moving away from the jazz stylings into a more
singer/songwriter rock direction, her playing wasn’t in the least
diminished or hidden in the mix.

I’ve included three videos below. There aren’t a whole lot of
good ones of her singing out there yet (apparently this past November
was her first show as a vocalist). The first is from an Australian TV
show, so it’s a little weirdly formatted, but it’s a good example
of her playing. The second is her from a recent Who show. The third is
one of her singing Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel, which is a
song I love, so I had to include it.